Posted
by
simonikeron Wednesday March 17, 2004 @10:39PM
from the xp-language-docious dept.

zensufi writes "CNET News has a story stating that Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications, giving the software giant a hedge against a growing international threat from open-source software." The piece explains: 'The Local Language Program will provide local and regional governments with "language interface packs" that government and academic developers can use to produce localized versions of the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 productivity package.'

The old myth that Columbus thought he was in India when he came to America, is just that, a myth. Not true.

The fact is, the term Indian is actually more accurate than most people think it is.First of all, there are no Native Americans. Never have been. Every human on earth originally came from Africa if you believe that whole evolution theory... The Indians originally came here from Asia.

The following is from George Carlin's Braindroppings, as it explains the origin of the term Ind

No. South Asian Indians are called that because the civilization was based around the Indus river valley. That is also the root for the word Hindu.

Native Americans/Indians were called Indians because the purpose of Columbus's excursion was to discover an alternate route to India. When they got here they realized it wasn't India but decided to call it the West Indies anyway. They also realized the people here weren't Indians but called them Red Indians.

There is nothing monopolistic about making your product available to as many people/organizations/governments that you can.

Even if you do it at a net loss to your company?

You could call that "generating goodwill" and I'm sure there will be people calling it just that. Company shareholders will tolerate some goodwill as long as they can be convinced it translates into the bottom line at some point. OTOH, I could take a fair hit of ill-will as a company as long as I was making billions of dollars per year

Tantrum? I'm delighted. In order to protect their monopoly on all fronts they are spreading their resources thinner and thinner in order to combat the various threats from competitors, open Source and open standards (for instance Linux, Open Office/Star Office, Java, XML, Mobile platforms) This means loss of focus, low quality, delayed releases. And hopefully their downfall.

Actually customizing their products to different markets. UN FRICKIN BELIEVABLE.

Now throw yer tantrum kids.

Actually it is likely a smokescreen. Microsoft has long touted their localization efforts while in reality avoiding numerous locales even when they have lots of customers in those locales. In the case of Hebrew, they declared there would never be Hebrew language versions of their software even though the Israeli government offered to pay for the development

"In the case of Hebrew, they declared there would never be Hebrew language versions of their software even though the Israeli government offered to pay for the development and ultimately even to supply the developers if that is what it took. Microsoft said NO."

In some of the better software products, you can just take the messages file and translate it yourself, without any need to request that the vendor enables that feature for you.

"Free Software", I think they call it. Hey, you even get freedom of lan

The Parent poster made an Insightful quip - pointing out that Microsoft's advancement will no doubt draw Linux-Zealots crying foul.

Despite the fact that first bunch of posts to this thread HAVE BEEN Linux-Zealots crying foul, the parent poster gets modded down.

Where? Perhapse you'd like to post links to the "first bunch" of crying-foul posts? And keep a close eye out for claims of monopolistic or anit-competative behavior. After all, that's what the "insightful" post claimed would be the complain

Open source, bad? HOW DARE YOU!!!11one!!!!....but seriously, Apple has M$ completely stomped. Not only is almost every app multi-language, but they make it very easy for the third-party developers to make their own apps multilingual - it's as easy as creating a Spanish.lproj file (or whatever language). Although you do have to actually translate it....

Actuaclly all it does take is a text file. Not an ASCII file, a utf-8 one. The system has built in support for many, many languages. The app needs to be written with localization in mind, yes, but once the localized strings are tagged as such, you only need to translate the messages and put them in their appropriate directories. Just look at all the specific localizations for Safari, for example. These people dont need access to the code, just the localized.strings file.

A vague unsupported statement by an AC moderated to +4.....
But hey, MS astroturfers like to shoot fast and make a lot of noise, so I guess I'm starting to get used to it. Anyways, when was the last time you used KDE [kde.org]?
FYI: KDE now supports
49 languages [slashdot.org]and the list is actively growing. On an other note, I seem to recall a story just recently about Microsoft refusing to update Microsoft Office for Hebrew on the Mac...

Yea, and in typical volunteer FOSS fashion, of the 79 language teams [kde.org], 11 have done enough work to be considered useful. Chinese and Japanese, the two most important, are only half translated.

You can bet the 35 Office XP localizations are a bit more polished. That's what profit can do for you.

Excellent point about KDE. Just adding that you can even translate KDE apps to whatever you want on your own using a GUI app called KBabel [kde.org]. I also disagree that Microsoft is way ahead in internationalization - it's not. Most areas I had experience in like adjusting keyboard layouts, application support for international characters has been generally more consistent on my Linux systems than XPs.

Microsoft is far ahead of open source projects in terms of language support in products BUT...

There is usually a version in your local language.
Microsoft Windows China version compleate with anti-Chinese slurs.
One of the first things local governments do with open source is translate the error messages and directions into something the staff can understand.

American companys are legendary for exporting crap. They don't even begin to understand local sensibilitys and insult or piss off everyone.
Microsoft is known for ignoring the sensabilitys of people INSIDE THE UNITED STATES and end up insulting or pissing off anyone who dosen't use Microsofts products and a larg part of the people that do.
American trampling of local culture plus Microsofts apathy twords anything not directly related to Microsoft culture equals an unholy nightmare in the error messages, system prompts, docs and anything else any Windows user has to deal with on a daily basis.

American:Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to log in

Vogon:Punch the guy next to you to urinate on the system

Annother example: "All your base are belonging to us"It sounds like the bad guy is saying "We captured all your military instalations" or something like that.Now would YOU want to deal with "All your base" every freaking time you logged in?And that presumming you didn't bumble into a cultrally significant notion.

Picture a Vogon pushing Control then Alt then Del.. not all at once but in sequence as if Control, Alt and Del were each letters to a word.(Did I mention Vogons are stupid?)Purely becouse of the context...

Microsoft is offering to let local governments to do the translations instead of doing it themselfs to address cultrally significant issues in the way things are put.Open Source projects automatcly do this becouse the translations are handled by locals.On the other hand....Yes most Open source projects don't support more than one language for lack of someone in a diffrent locality than the project leader.

... MS is already light years ahead of OSS in terms of localization and supporting foreign languages.

That's not quite true. Certainly, their translated versions of Windows, Office and so on are very well done, but there's one very major problem with them: they're each separate versions.

I want English, my wife wants German. It's not possible to install a Windows box so that we both get what we want - we have to choose one and we're stuck with it. OpenOffice is the same (both Windows and Unix versions)

The open source article says "The language spoken by most Rwandans has no word for "computer"... the Rwandan [open source] developers created their own: "mudasobwa," which roughly means "something or someone that does not make mistakes."

While this is stupid, it's nowhere near the level of replacing the word "french" with the word "freedom" as was popular amongst Americans of the more moronic classes(not to say that people don't have the right to disapprove of the French, but that they think renaming their food is an adequate way of expressing this dislike). In any event e-mail is probably too well established to be ousted in use by any but the most arrogantly patriotic.

They'll be lucky if they can even keep their government officials using

I don't know exactly what this "hedge" is. Open-source software has been translated by locals for a long time already. It seems that something even more important to these locals would be the price and reliability of their machines. GNU/Linux might be the better system for them to run, given limited resources.

So Microsoft is giving us the priviledge of letting us translate their products for them. For some reason I don't think this will work well commercial product. You paid for it, why should you work more? Obviously for open source, it's diffrent.

Er... as an employee of an academic institution, I really must protest.

First, you're an insensitive clod.

Second, the money that we get comes from a mix of payments made by students and funded legislated by the state. Neither of those sources are eager to part with their cash, and in order to earn it, the institution has to provide value.

Part of proviing value in our case is delivering the maximum service for the smallest outlay of cash. In other words, you're damn skippy we have to pinch our pennies, often to the point of under-funding projects, begging for grant money, and underpaying the staff and faculty. This we do in the name of providing a higher education, because there's no money to be made here. Only reputations.

The trick is to pinch the pennies in ways that appear extravegant and bold, to "show" that we're a competitive, forward-thinking institution with the future in mind.

So ah, tell me. How do I convince my Japanese version of Windows XP Home to display OS messages in English?

The last time I tried to search for an answer, the only one I found was: buy an English version, back-up everything, install English version, restore from backup. This is a far cry from setting your LANG envvar.

While I'm at it, I can complain that under this version of the OS, a whole bunch of English-language software seems to have uglified small fonts, sometimes to the point of illegibility.

Oh, and how do you enter full-width katakana from the command prompt? It seems impossible. Which makes entering the localized name of the Local Area Connection tricky in netsh. (As far as I can tell, you have to cut and paste the name.)

Not to mention the way that the IME taskbar widget regularly gets obscured by other taskbar widgets making changing input settings a pain in the neck. Microsoft's own deskswitcher application is a particular offender in this regard.

Sure it has localization, but it doesn't appear to be especially well thought out (infamously bad translations aside), and certainly its internationalization quality leaves something to be desired.

Give them some credit where it is due. Microsoft has always pushed multi language support at every level long before OSS was a serious contender. All their OS API's support unicode, multi language versions of their OS's and many applications have been around a long time.

Is this MS saying "We're sick of all your complaints about incorrect rtranslations, so we're going to let you do your own translations, so we don't have to pay these translators any more."

MSS: Microsoft Support, how can I help you?Non-US User: Hi, there are three buttons on this dialogue box I'm getting which translate to "Next", "Yes" and "Ok". How do I know which one to press?MSS: I'm sorry, we don't support foreign language issues. Please call your local technical support and talk to your translation team.

I wonder if somewhere down the line MS will turn around and lock up users into only opening files made under a certain language something a-la DVD "scheme" (yea dual use term that word scheme). So user Wong in China creates files in China to send to his brother Ming in America. Will user Wong also have to buy an addon somewhere in the future?

This sounds to me like they're just outsourcing the task of translating their software to different languages to other small countries that wouldn't make it financially worth it for microsoft to do it.

Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications

Shouldn't that be the other way around? Why should governments be doing Microsoft's work? If Microsoft wants to sell in upper Mongolia, it ought to make the effort to localize its own damn software for that market.

If you ask me, this is just one more example of Microsoft's incredible hubris.

MS is going about it in a brilliant strategic way. They realize that it is not financially worthwhile for them to do it themselves. Instead they are getting the help of user who might want to use their product.
Right now upper Mongolia doesnt have a customised version of Linux or Windows. There is nothing to stop Upper Mongolia from creating a language pack for KDE. What MS has done is to provide an alternative to that, maybe at a lower cost.

I'm in China and I've never seen a non-pirate version of any piece of software, including on computers of reputable companies. Not only is there no respect for copyright, there is no understanding of the concept. The increase in profit will not be that great because everyone will use the new localised software... but in pirate copies with no money going to MS... but I guess that's ok if you rate it by convenience to humanity.

I think this is about maintaining long term control of the desktop. As long as MS has this control, they can also control the protocols. As long as they can control the protocols, they can minimize threats from competitors.

For instance, if China were to start using OSS, that would mean that IE would not be dominant browser. This would mean that web designer would not just be able to buy a copy of Frontpage and use the templates to design a site, but would have use tools that could create effective co

Unfortunately MS fails to realize that simple translation may not be enough. Take Office v.X on the Mac for example. It's lack of full RTL and Unicode support means some languages can't be supported, even if just the interface is translated. Rubi for Japanese is another language feature that may require access to the source code itself. Not to mention other tasks like modifying their English grammar checker to support new languages...

Merely providing the ability to make a "Language Pack" and translate the strings on the screen does not provide enough access to really support foreign languages. Without full access to the source code, foreign languages will still remain second class citizens

Not necessarily, they could break it down into a really generic format that would allow others to code new grammer settings in. I don't think you need access to everything to simply change the language around. They're not going to open it up and that's their choice. They spend the money to develop it and it's their right to keep it closed. If you don't like it, then don't buy it.

I agree. Lack of unicode support in Word can be crippling for a scholar writing about ancient Greek texts. MS simply doesn't allow such a scholar to look up ancient texts on perseus [tufts.edu] and just copy and paste a couple of lines of the Greek in a Greek font with accents. Too bad - you gotta retype every letter and hope you know the language well enough to get the accents right.

Just because they're aware doesn't necessarily mean they take their own knowlege into account. Does Messenger support vertical text for Japanese (or AIM, or iChat for that matter...I honestly don't know)? Is the user interface assumed for these apps even usable for vertical text input and display? I know my IM text input line is at the bottom of the chat window and near assumes top to bottom text ordering.

I think what they intend to do is lick some govt ass and trick them into using localized language software and what happens eventually is that the govt files an anti-trust kind lawsuit againt MS! that would be nice.

Funny that it took so long for MS to realize they'd been had... I remember a friend of mine translating KDE documentation in french about 4 years ago...
Not to mention the fact that asian fonts have been almost constantly present under linux, as far as I can remember.
Besides, China already has Dragon Linux, and they wouldn't switch back to windows for anything else than a nuclear war threat... and even then it'd be a tough challenge! So guess what: that's not going to make a difference in the long run. MS has lost the initiative, and they're trying to make believe they still have it... I hope we can prove they're behind the Opensource community, and have been ever since linux came to being!

I have worked on a couple projects that allowed language localization. If the code is designed with modern standards in mind, it was quite easy to localize (at least for western languages) as all text was kept kept in separate resource files. The same for icons, et al. On the Mac such things could be changed, from day one, by resedit, a free and very usable application. This resulted in various themes based on Bloom County and other topics. It also allowed offensive icons to be modified. Of course, U

The Amiga did this over a decade ago with it's "locale" settings. Anybody could produce a localised translation of application menus etc. In fact there are hundreds of such "locale" settings on aminet. [uni-paderborn.de]

Their language packs wouldn't be complete without these languages/alphabets:

- Ebonics- Pig latin- Esperanto- Elvish- Klingon- Linear B

I guarantee you Microsoft won't support any of these. But the open source community is certainly not above it, and will surely be the only recourse for anyone needing to localize software in those languages. And I'm sure there's more I haven't named here.

I read an account in 1999(?) detailing how the government of Iceland wrote to M$ about when they expected to develop packages to run the OS in Icelandic. M$ replied "Well, hmm, never". Not enough by itself, but I just remember that this was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Other fun translations:firewall: inter-network screen of defense (mezhsetevoi ekran zaschity), though "fayervoll" is used far more commonlyhard drive: firm disk (zhestkii disk), though among techies the word "vint" is commonly u

For a while now, they've actually been producing local-language software, in a desultory and half-assed way, specifically in response to (usually much better) local-language free software. See, for ex., http://www.kyfieithu.co.uk/item.php?lg=en&item_id= 79 for Welsh, Nynorsk (the *other* Norwegian), and Catalan.

I can understand the spirit of community service that inspires people to volunteer their time and resources to open source localization projects.

But here we have a company with over $60 billion in the bank, pulling in more than $1 billion per month in pure profits, raking in unheard of profit margins on their products, and they are asking local and regional governments to provide them with gratis localization services.

Years ago I sold a package called Win/V that allowed you to run native Japanese applications on Windows for Workgroups. This was significant since there was never a Japanese WfW but the Japanese users wanted the networking features.

What made Win/V different is that it didn't just modify the interface to support a different language as the MultiLingual Packs do, but added the underlying code that localized versions of applications need. This way you could run the Japanese version of Excel for example and get all the local features like rubi and Japanese dates but still be running on an English version of the OS. Embassies loved this system as the underlying OS and network would be supported from the home country.

Macs have had this for years with their Language Kits and I don't think Windows has ever matched it. What happens if you try to install Japanese Office 2K on English XP?

Here's what I've heard on the street, and I could be
highly inaccurate, but here it is anyway:

Some weeks ago, CNet came out with an article [com.com]
on localization, using Rwanda as an example.

Within a day or two, Microsoft had reps in that
country, and offered the government all the MS
software it wanted at $2 (US equiv) a CD. Also,
resellers would get a sweet deal, to either
increase profits there, or lower the cost of
computers.

With all their billions in the bank, why can't they just pay for the translations? I can't believe that a government would spend resources doing translation work for Microsoft.

Of course, M$ is going to try to get away with not having to pay for it. But I doubt governments (and of course just those of relatively low-population countries) will want to assist funding for them, seeing as how they have such a huge war chest.

I feel confident that gov's will prefer to fund translation on Linux, and M$ will be forced to pay for the their own translation anyway, if they want to get into the market.

It sounds incredible to me that Microsoft actually tries to get governments to translate their software for them free, while Open Source localization groups are desperate with getting governments to participate or provide even little funding.

Perhaps we would need to organize better?

For some time, I've been trying to find out if there exists a collective effort for localizing open source software, which covers both all softwares and all locales.

Currently, we seem to have two types of localization efforts: software-specific and national efforts. For example, the major OSS softwares, such as KDE, Gnome, and OpenOffice have organized translation efforts. Then there are some national efforts. For example, in Finland, we have organized a joint national effort [www.iki.fi] as a working group, which gathers the different Finnish localization teams together and aims to provide them publicity, recruiting, funding, other resources, and generally a channel for cooperation. We currently have KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Debian, and some other translation teams working together on common issues such as quality, vocabulary, and tools. I have noticed that there exists also some other national or language-specific efforts, such as for Arabic and South-African languages. However, I haven't found any cooperation effort between these national efforts, where we could participate.

So, what I'm looking for is a universal effort that covers both all the different localization projects for different softwares, and for the different languages (or nationalities). There exists some more-or-less generic efforts, such as the Translation Project, but those which I've seen cover only a limited set of software products (TP covers some 100 but it's still rather limited).

If you know about such an universal cover effort, please tell me.

Otherwise, perhaps the time is ripe for starting to plan for such an effort. I'm not talking about any massive organization, just a loose, light-weight organization that would serve as a center for information sharing and cooperation. Well, basicly a well-structured web portal would suffice.

I begun to wonder about this last fall, when I started designing a portal-based information system for the Finnish national localization effort and did preliminary organization analysis. I noticed that many of the tools we would need would also be useful for others. Well, of course it may be difficult to unify such tools between different efforts, as different efforts have their own preferences, but it would be nice to get to know what other efforts need and what they could contribute.

Our Finnish national effort is still slowly forming, but we are quite active in certain areas such as quality assurance. We have had one joint workshop event so far and have planned to have one twice a year (next one is scheduled for May). Last year, we produced a 26 page report about the status of different Finnish localization projects. We have also tried to make contacts with translation departments of universities. Our effort for getting funding is still in infancy.

We would very much like to share "patterns" of organizing national and software-specific efforts and serving the actual translation teams.

In Wales we have had experience of this - Microsoft recently announced that they would make a Welsh LIP available. However:

The LIP only translates a minority of strings in the UI. OTOH most Open-Source software lets you do a full translation.

It is monolingual - once Welsh LIP is installed, all users of that computer get the Welsh interface. This is almost useless in a country like Wales, where most businesses are bilingual. Most Open-Source software supports UI language choice at start time, or at least lets you install multiple copies for different languages.

It is unsafe - there is no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to make this available in the future. When planning IT for a large organisation, you need more security than 2 years into the future. Open-Source licences guarantee that governments, or volunteers, will always have the power to translate software, at a predictable cost.

Having said that, it's certainly a start. I think we will see Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors, forced to provide localisation in the future, to compete with Open-Source software which enables this.

...I'm just wondering when they're going to openly admit that to themselves and the public.For years I've been wondering why Microsoft doesn't join the corporate fray of OSS, on the way mixing it with their branding and doing a branding variant of the 'embrace and extend' thing they're into. After all, nobody gave a damn about licensing until MS started ranting about the GPL being anti-american and at the same time screwing up their licensing as to piss everybody off.

Anyway, I've narrowed in on some optinal answers to this question:1) MS is to big, slow and stupid and the chiefs are to Windows-focused that they don't see the light.--I don't think this is the real truth. It fits into a typical MS rant and would fit to a megacorporation the size of MS, but considering that they actually are a software company, and a quite succesfull one I think this answer is to simple.

2) MS couldn't care less. Even if they only hopp on in 2 years from now when they've milked the last proprietary cow, they'll just throw in a few billion, by the one or other Linux company, mix in a little DirectX and Exchange for Linux and squish RH, SuSE and Madrake along the way.--This seems more likely. But then again, if that's their plan, they would have started this much earlier. And I dont think they could gain foothold any more, neither now or 2 years from now.

3) The MS revenue stream relys so much on markting hype and exclusive Windows branding that MS has no other choice than to take up the fight, even if they're going to lose in the end anyway. They'd rather shoot themselves than admit that OSS has them by the balls and start an ordered retreat out of the proprietary software market in the long run. Taking every money they can get on the way and pushing forth into embedded and home entertainment systems.--I would think this to be the best answer. Yet even this way it's a dead end for MS as a monopoly. No way in hell can they stand up to a Sony & Matsushita tag team who've just decided to use Linux as their prime embeded system for home entertainment - because it's cheaper and has less lock-in.

Either way you put it, MS as the master-blaster-of-all-things-Computer is done with. They'll either manage to get the curve into a major service and embeded vendor and strengthen their strong branding in that area or they're going to end up like Commodore or something simular.My 2 Eurocents.

You make it sound like Microsoft is leading the pack, when in fact they are trying to catch up with the rest. All big Linux distro's have supported localisation (including the most obscure languages) for years. Mac OSX is even better in this respect, as all OSX apps support localization (you can even write your own by creating an XML file with the translated strings and adding it to the app) and uses unicode throughout, so I can just cut-and-paste Japa